Northern Irish Town Goes Cultural to Shake Image of Bombings

By Colm Heatley -
Sep 21, 2012

If Shona McCarthy had one wish, it
would be that peace will come to the Northern Irish city of
Derry next year when it becomes the U.K. City of Culture.
Dissident republicans have different ideas and they’ve already
bombed her office twice.

“This could be great for the city,” said McCarthy, chief
executive officer of the Derry Culture Company 2013 Ltd. “Of
course you take the bombings seriously, but this event could end
this image of Derry as a town of bombs and bullets. It could be
a real watershed. That’s what excites me.”

The region’s leaders want to use the festival to bolster
the region’s peace and spur investment, while dissidents want to
end the province’s U.K. link by reigniting a conflict that
claimed 3,500 lives before largely ending in 1998. In July, two
dissident groups, the Real Irish Republican Army and Derry-based
Republican Action Against Drugs, a vigilante group, said they
were uniting to become more effective.

“Derry isn’t part of Britain, this is a disgrace,” said
Gary Donnelly, a spokesman for the 32 County Sovereignty
Committee, the political wing of the Real IRA, that killed two
British soldiers in 2009. “Republicans will oppose it for sure.
There is a section of this city that gives its loyalty to
militant republicanism.”

Two bombs were defused in Derry today by a British Army
bomb squad, Northern Ireland police said in an e-mailed
statement. The devices were found in the Strand Road area of the
city and police are still attending the area.

Bombs, Shootings

Dissidents have also killed two policemen since restarting
their campaign in 2009. In 2010, they bombed an Ulster Bank Ltd.
office in Derry and last year they attacked a branch of Banco
Santander SA (SAN) in the city. In the 12 months through March, they
shot 11 people in Derry, compared with 33 for the whole of
Northern Ireland, according to police statistics.

Two masked men entered the city of culture offices in Derry
in October 2011 and planted a bomb, causing extensive damage,
police said at the time. It was the second attack on the
offices, which have now moved to a different part of the city.
McCarthy said the move is unrelated to the attacks.

Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness,
the city’s former IRA commander, is backing the festival and
said the dissidents “can’t win.”

Dissidents split from Sinn Fein and the IRA in 1997 because
they opposed moves toward peace and their campaign is centred on
Derry where British troops were first deployed in 1969.

Derry, a city of about 84,000 people with an 80 percent
nationalist majority, is also where British troops shot dead 13
unarmed Catholic civilians in 1972, an act which a 2010 official
report said exacerbated the violence that dominated the region
until an IRA ceasefire in 1994.

Queen’s Handshake

In June, McGuinness shook hands with Queen Elizabeth II in
Belfast, the first time a senior Sinn Fein member has greeted a
member of the Royal Family. McGuinness, whose Sinn Fein
supported the IRA for more than three decades and whose party
still wants a united Ireland, said it was designed to heal
divisions. For some in Derry, McGuinness’s home town, it meant
little.

Close to the community center where Donnelly gave his
interview, six-foot high graffiti reads: “Ireland unfree shall
never be at peace - support the IRA.” A nearby row of shops is
where dissident republicans bring young people, deemed guilty of
petty crimes, to be shot in the legs, said Darren O’Reilly, a
local youth worker.

Unemployment in the city is at almost 9 percent, the
highest in Northern Ireland, and deep divisions remain within
the community. There isn’t even agreement about the city’s name,
with Catholics preferring Derry and Protestants favoring
Londonderry. When a bridge linking the mainly Protestant
waterside of the city to the cityside opened earlier this year,
it was marred by bomb alerts.

Dissident Support

“The dissidents will react to the U.K. city of culture
year with the only thing they have, violence,” says Pete
Shirlow a politics professor at Queen’s University Belfast.
“Derry is one of the few places where some people are listening
to the dissidents. The reality is they have very little support
anywhere in Ireland.”

The 2013 City of Culture program, which will see Derry host
the all-Ireland traditional music festival as well as the Tate
Modern prize and produce new plays, promises to shake off this
violent image of the city as well as bringing in about 2 million
visitors and 40 million pounds ($64.7 million) of revenue, said
McCarthy.

Still for Donnelly it is an opportunity to “show Northern
Ireland isn’t normal.”

“Armed resistance is 100 percent legitimate,” he said.
“We are still ruled by Britain. This is an attempt to make
people believe Derry is a part of the U.K. It will be
resisted.”